Why Is Spike Lee Considered An Auteur

Why Authorship is important in film studies

There have been a lot of arguments about directors being regarded as authors in the film industry. In this essay, I will talk about the auteur theory and the directors who I think can be considered this status.
The French term ‘auteur’ means author and it came about by French film critics in the 1920s. However much controversy regarding the use of auteur was brought about by a new film critic group called Cahier Du Cinema. It was founded by a French critic called Francois Truffaut. film club and met André Bazin, a French critic, who becomes his protector. Bazin helped the delinquent Truffaut and also when he was put in jail because he deserted the army. In 1953, he published his first movie critiques
in "Les Cahiers du Cinema." In this magazine, Truffaut and some of his friends as passionate as he is, became defender of what they call the "author policy

Although there are many that have been considered to be auteurs, I will talk about two directors who I think fit this mode. Firstly I think Spike lee should be considered an author. The reason being is because
I would say that Spike Lee was an Auteur.
Pam Cook defines the word Auteur as the ‘stylistic signature of the Director’. (Cinema Book, Pam Cook, p60). Many of Spike Lee’s films are usually set in New York Brooklyn, where he grew up. For example, The Clockers. It focuses on the workings of a local drug gang and ongoing dealings with local drug dealers, dealing with the police and the community. Many of Spike Lee’s films relate to race relations, poverty, crime and the role of the media. He uses Mise en Scene to illustrate his personal beliefs and background. For example, ‘Do the right Thing’ was made in New York 1989 and this was considered to be his landmark film. It demonstrated the racial relations between two ethnic groups and the violence which was inflicted on one another in the community. There are various films where he uses a ‘floating effect’. These include films such as Mo Better Blue’s, Malcolm X and inside man. It gives the audience the impression that the character is floating in the air instead of
walking.
Most of Spike Lee films usually feature African American people such as Denzel Washington in ‘Malcolm X’, ‘Mekhi Thira Phifer in Clockers’; and Will Smith in ‘Ali’. He uses his background and heritage to point out social issues from the time he grew up Brooklyn New York. He also is a big baseball fan of the New York Knicks and often makes reference to baseball teams and players in his films. ‘The best films it was argued, were those ‘quality’ productions that dealt with serious social issues’ (The Cinema Book, Pam Cook, p410). I think Spike Lee often made his films relevant to what he saw society. For example, he has been quoted saying, ‘Black people have never had the power to enforce racism, and so this is something that white America is going to have to work out themselves. If they decide they want to stop it, curtail it, or to do the right thing then it will be done, but not until then.’ (IMDB.COM). In the film ‘Do the right thing’ it explores the violence and racism between two groups in Brooklyn in which it was area Spike Lee grew up in.

In conclusion, I think Spike Lee is an Auteur because he puts across his views of social issues that have affected him. This can be shown in his films such as ‘Malcolm x’ and ‘Do the Right thing’. He sees himself as someone that is be able to represent black people and to put his views across the media as not a lot of black people have the opportunity to do so. He also interprets real life family members in his films. For example, ‘In Do the Right Thing (1989) , for example, he cast Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee (real-life husband and wife), himself and Joie Lee (real-life siblings), and Danny Aiello and Rick Aiello (real-life father and son),’ (IMDB.COM). This makes the film feel real as the relationship between the characters are real.
Another person who I think is an auteur is John Ford. His parents were Irish immigrants who arrived in the United States in 1872. They had 11 children in all, six of whom lived to adulthood. John was their tenth child, born between a girl and a boy who both died as infants. A saloon-keeper and an alderman, the Feeney family pater familias was a stereotypical Irish American, dabbling in both booze and politics in Portland, where John attended high school. Funeral goers in his movies usually sing the hymn "Shall We Gather at the River."

In the mid-1940s, after working in many genres, Ford began to focus on Westerns again, beginning with My Darling Clementine (1946), one of the classics of the genre. Many of his Westerns featured John Wayne, whom he had first worked with on Stagecoach (1939) and who became a superstar in Howard Hawks' classic oater Red River (1948). Wayne appeared in Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), and Rio Grande (1950), the famous "Cavalry Trilogy." Along with "My Darling Clementine," Ford was plumbing the nature of American myth-making, and the creation of history as an historical narrative, that is, the re-creation of history, after the fact, i.e., history as something man-made, thus fallible. He had found the perfect correlative for Hollywood myth-making. This strain of John Ford's canon would reach its apotheosis a dozen years later, with The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), which took on these issues with a literalness that caused many contemporary critics to dismiss the film.

John Ford created so many classic Westerns t hat he began to be associated with the genre.
It's interesting to note that from 1950 through 1959, he made only one Western, the classic The Searchers (1956), one of the greatest examples of the genre. Starting with The Horse Soldiers (1959) which he made for the Mirisch Co. at the end of the decade, six of his last eight completed movies were Westerns, including his last masterpiece, "The Man Who Shot Liberty
Valance."
What I think makes a good auteur is someone that adds their own style or background into their films. John Ford could be considered different to Spike Lee as he directed films under the Hollywood studio system whereas Spike Lee is more self produced independent even though he gets some financial backing from the Hollywood studios.